1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to communication systems and in particular, to near-field communication systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Near-Field Communication (NFC) systems have become an important new applications area for enterprises and service providers. In a typical NFC system, a user brings an NFC-enabled badge, such as an employee ID badge or a student ID card, in close contact with an NFC reader, and the identity of the NFC tag and NFC reader are passed along via an IP network to a server that provides user-dependent and reader-dependent services. For example, when a university student touches his/her NFC badge to a reader, a door to a dormitory may be opened. Data on the NFC badge may also be linked to the student's identification to trigger payments for purchases. For example, a student may use his/her NFC badge to pay for a meal in the cafeteria or to purchase books in the campus bookstore.
Recently, there has been an interest in delivering additional services on top of the traditional access control services provided by existing (legacy) NFC systems. For example, when a student gains access to campus facility using his/her NFC badge, the student may desire to have his/her location presence on Facebook or Netlog automatically updated. As another example, an enterprise employee may want to touch his/her NFC badge to an NFC reader associated with a PBX phone, and have the profile for the PBX phone automatically customized for this employee.
Unfortunately, legacy NFC badge/reader systems typically use private, non-standard IP-based communication protocols that make it extremely cumbersome or impossible for creative Web 2.0 developers to innovate and to add their services on top of existing infrastructure. For example, existing solution approaches include forming business relationships with all of the various access control system manufacturers, requesting that their server-based solutions expose Web 2.0 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), and updating their access control software in many existing legacy installations. As can be appreciated, this process is cumbersome, expensive, and largely impractical. Therefore, what is needed is a mechanism for “opening-up” the legacy, closed, proprietary NFC systems to new Web 2.0 services, without impacting, disrupting or otherwise disturbing the functionality already present in such systems.